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RIGA, Latvia — There’s precious little, if any margin for error for the Ottawa team in the women’s world curling championship.

A 7-6 victory over Italy and an 8-4 loss to Sweden on Tuesday left skip Rachel Homan, third Emma Miskew, second Alison Kreviazuk and lead Lisa Weagle with a 4-3 record and tied for fourth with Japan, Switzerland and the United States in the round-robin standings.

Sweden and Scotland share top spot at 6-1, followed by Russia at 5-2.

Given the way the competition has split into groups of contenders and those with little or no hope of playoff spots, it’s beginning to look as if eight wins will be required to finish in the top four, with seven perhaps enough to get into a tie-breaker.

So Homan and Co. probably need to run the table in their final four games, starting with the early Wednesday matchup against Germany and the later contest against Switzerland. They finish the round-robin portion of the competition against China and Japan on Thursday.

“All we know is that we need to keep winning, and that’s what we are going to focus on,” Homan said. “We are trying not to focus on who is beating who out there.

“All we can do is try and win our games.”

Against the Swedes, the Canadians gave up a steal in the opening end after Homan’s attempt to come around a guard at the top of the rings instead rubbed one of those stones and went the wrong way.

Homan got that one back with a hit to cap the third end, and Canada held Sweden to another single in the fourth. A tough draw for Homan with her last shot of the fifth end was short of the mark, but the single point the Canadians had anyway evened the count against at 2-2.

A nifty raise tapback for Homan in the sixth left the Swedes only the option of a hit for one, and Maria Prytz, who throws final stones for the team skipped by Margaretha Sigfridsson, succeeded. Three-two Sweden.

The seventh end was looking promising for Canada, but then Prytz buried a draw behind cover. Homan attempted a long angle raise, but missed it, and that gave the Swedes a steal for 4-2.

Homan’s team managed to capitalize on a corner guard to bury one of its own in the eighth, and the skip was able to draw for a second point that produced the third tie of the game, at 4-4.

The Swedes blanked the ninth and kept last-rock advantage for 10.

By the time they got to Prytz’s final stone, the Canadians had a well-guarded stone in the back of the four-foot. The Swedish rock dislodged that counter, leaving the Swedes with the winning points.

“We’ll take it one game at a time,” Kreviazuk said. “If we have to go through tie-breakers (to get a playoff spot), then so be it.

“We’re not out of it by any means.”

The Canadians also played from behind against the Italians (2-5), although Diana Gaspari’s team had the benefit of last-rock advantage to score its two in the opening end.

Canada got those two back in the second end, Italy went ahead again with one in the third, and Homan made a hit with her final shot to score three in the fourth.

Gaspari was forced to make a draw against a clutch of Canadian counters in the fifth, making the score 5-4, but Homan’s team blanked the sixth and seventh.

In the eighth, Italy lodged a couple of stones into the four-foot circle, but Homan, who had struggled mightily with draw weight in Monday’s 5-4 extra-end loss to the United States, had no trouble at all this time and hit the edge of the button for one point and a 6-4 advantage.

Gaspari played a quiet tap-back for two in the ninth, tying the score 6-6, but that gave last-rock advantage to Canada for the final end.

Homan and her teammates kept play of the right side of the sheet for that end because water droplets from a leaky roof kept creating bubbles on the left side about halfway between the rings and the hog-line.

The 23-year-old skip said the left side was unusable in even-number ends because the icemakers had to scrape off the deposited bubbles and re-pebble that section. The leak had been discovered, Homan added, after one of the droplets landed on Kreviazuk’s head.

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